Archive for the ‘mass effect’ tag

My Mass Effect 3 play through started off so well - so promising, so full of hope. I was going to get the best ending possible, the one where everyone lives happily ever after and nothing was going to stop me. Yes, OK, the reapers were here and they were tearing the earth a new one, but I was confident I had the friends and the ballsy get-it-done attitude to sort them out one way or another. They were messing with the wrong galaxy this time.

Joe, Clive and Harry are joined by David Hing and sit down to help discuss the wealth of news that poured out of E3 2011 last week. This includes the unveiling of the Nintendo Wii U and the PlayStation Vita, as well as the release dates for Mass Effect 3 and Battlefield 3.

We didn't limit ourselves to just E3 announcements, though. A croaky Joe also let us know what the Duke Nukem Forever launch party was like, while the rest of us speculated about how the game would shape up. Check out the Duke Nukem Forever review to see how right everyone was in their predictions!

You might think the poor combat, terrible graphics and lack of stats were what made Jade Empire such a bad RPG, but you’d be wrong.

No, what really kills it is how terribly boring it is. It’s dreadful, really; duller than an inflatable knife - and it’s not just simply tedious either. Jade Empire’s banality can be divided into two separate levels of boredom.

Firstly, there’s the plot itself, which is so predictable it’d be enough to make anyone think they’d become clairvoyant. You play an orphan who has been raised by the teacher of an awesome Kung Fu school that sits unmolested in the rural outskirts of the standard Wuxia setting. Apparently you’ve never questioned about your parentage until the day that Master Li ominously lets you know you have an important destiny.

I may as well start off by saying that I don’t usually like my games to be too difficult and that, if I’m sitting down to play a game for my own enjoyment, I’ll almost never, ever put it on Hard difficulty. In fact, I’m more likely to play it on Easy.

There’s a lot of people who’ll baulk at that; the type of people who label themselves as ‘hardcore’ gamers with an inflated sense of pride and dismiss the majority of titles as ‘baby-games’, most likely. Despite what they think though, I think my reasons for opting for a lesser difficulty are pretty good ones.

It comes down to a matter of taste and what you’re looking for – and what I usually look for in the games I play at home is a good story and the chance to have some fun. Sticking the game on maximum difficulty is something that’s more likely to get in the way of that than facilitate it and the worst fear I have with any new game is that I’ll play it on Hard, love the story, reach an impassable boss and then get stuck. In that situation I’d be more likely to put the game down and move on than to replay on a lower skill setting – and I’d hate to miss out on a tale I’d otherwise enjoy.

After finishing my new gaming rig recently, I installed a few games that I’ve been meaning to get through. Mass Effect and Fallout 3 were amongst those titles. I’d dabbled in both before but found that the slow pace and masses of dialogue weren't really what I was looking for at that time. This is a pair of games that focus heavily on storyline. However, I always had the nagging feeling that I was missing out on some great games and so, with my new rig purring away, wanted to give them another shot.

Posted on 22nd Dec 2009 at 10:49 by Richard Swinburne with 11 comments

Firstly, I have to apologise. I've succumbed to the marketing gimmick that is “the cloud”. However, there is a point to this so don't worry - you’re not reading a press release.

After reading and getting excited about Mass Effect 2 – how it will be possible to carry on your player profile, and the in third release sometime in the future – the player will apparently be open to “wildly different conclusions” leading to massive diversity of story.

What gets me, in the traditional model of selling one game, then another, then another, why Bioware didn’t opt for the more “MMO”-esq model of having things tied in extensively online. The limitations of adding these epic, whole game updates is that users lose save games and profiles after a year or so between releases, or, you still have to pander to those who didn’t buy the earlier releases to some extent because your publisher wants every successive release of the franchise to sell more. In a model that requires you to buy previous games, the opposite is true – you’re more likely to lose people that fall out of gaming, forget about it or lose love for it, than attain more.

The CPC podcast is now a legal adult with its 18th episode; it features Clive on the hosting mic for the first time, and he’s joined by Orestis, Phil and games reviewer extraordinaire, Dan Emery. The team look back at the GeForce GTX 280 launch, and discuss the top 10 games, including awesome new launches Race Driver GRID and Mass Effect. With Editor Alex away, the team also struggle with what words they’re allowed to say, and what are too controversial to be broadcast. There’s also the guess the game music competition, with copies of City of Heroes and Villains to be won.